It's really easy to say "interviewing is broken" and get a bunch of people excited and agreeing. It's almost like saying "politics is broken," everybody agrees but doesn't agree how to fix it.

I can tell you we've gotten rave reviews from the companies we've partnered with, and almost all of the candidates we've tested with this love our process better than the alternative. I can't fix interviewing for everybody, but I think we're on a pretty good track for at least some of the world. I'll take that, for now.

Love this, although not living in that area.

Just to chime in: I'm a PhD student in CS/machine learning with a competitive enough CV to interview anywhere, and I have gone through the motions at many companies previously (e.g. for interning), and there is nothing I hate more than coding interviews.

It literally makes me hate companies, it turns me off from interviewing at a place, and it makes me deeply resent them even if I get an offer after a ridiculous series of interviews.

After you have subjected me to a terrible/demeaning interview process, I might still work for you, but I will never be a loyal or feel any inclination to contribute more than I need for personal gain, because you have established that nature of the relationship via the interview. Sorry for the rant.

I hope you succeed, so very much.

I think you need to grow up some and experience this from the other side. In the past I've felt the same kind of contempt for this process, but after having experienced being on the other side I respect the difficulty in identifying(accuratly) good candidates.

Honestly I don't think I need to do, I have interviewed many people for doing very code heavy research projects and not once have I felt asking them to do a white-board code exercise would have contributed to my evaluation meaningfully.

Here is idea for you, aspiring recruiter - you want great engineers to interview? Pay them $150/hour to work on your github repo that you want to use in interview.

Everyone wins - engineers don’t get their time wasted, and interviewing companies are quite interested in not to waste theirs.

I addressed this in another comment, but just to respond to you: we've done test interviews where we paid candidates $80 and hour. The expense works into our model so I would anticipate seeing some form of that in the future.

This is essentially how Wordpress does interviews. It’s the best process I’ve seen.

So your solution is to have people work a second for free with the hope that maybe they'll get a job after a while?

We're still new to this, but we have tried a few interviews where we pay the candidate $80 an hour (~$160k salary annualized). On average, good candidates complete the projects in about 3.3 hours, so that's a ~$270 expense to us, which we've been fine with.

Candidates who did the unpaid version saw the clear value: they invest 3-5 hours once, and potentially cut out 20+ hours of first round interviews, or even all the studying like the OP did.

Nobody that we've tested in the beta complained about a few hours of free "work" - they were actually excited about it.

I really like that you compensate candidates for their time. I can't think of anyone else who follows that model presently, so thank you for keeping in mind being fair to prospective hires. Are you all SF-only?

We're just in SF/NYC right now, but this model travels well. Hopefully you'll see us a in a lot more places by the end of the year.

London please. I'll be a customer.

Do any of those SF/NYC companies hire remote employees?

To be fair to OP, I think there's ways to structure throwaway projects in such a way that it contains flaws and they're useless to a real company but complex enough to gauge experience/familiarity, etc. I don't think GitHub would be optimal since then people could clone these throwaway projects and create brain dumps.

We actually pay contracted engineers (up $100/hr) to write these projects. They're usually recreations of interesting problems have had to implement or work on in their careers. Some are just forks of open source projects.

We don't turn around an use the code the candidate wrote. If you consider the cost to use to write the project AND the cost to have it reviewed N number of times, we'd be overpaying drastically for that feature to be implemented.

Why don't you get the companies who are hiring to have their engineers setup & write some code?

Code reviews worth both ways.

> In that git repo is a project with real code and a few features/bug fixes for you to implement.

Is this from you or from the company? If it’s from you what kind of project is it? Web development? It seems like the technology stacks are so diverse it’s hard to give a coding test that’s applicable to a wide range of companies.

We have a library of these projects. We add more all the time. We built the first set. Now we're paying engineers to build these based on really interesting problems they've solved in their careers.

We don't reuse the projects across different stacks. We might borrow some of the underlying themes or principles, but they're different projects for different stacks, each written by somebody with very precise domain expertise.

So this is just minor tweaks (not that anonymity is not a bad idea per say) to the already despised status quo.

How is this going to broaden the application pool to include neurodiverse candidates and not just pander to the credentialist notion that rote leaning to get a piece of paper makes you the best candidate.

Can you help me understand how I can help "broaden the application pool to include neurodiverse candidates?"

We're only in private beta now, but the goal is that when we launch, it will be open for any person to apply to. I don't see our model ever being some that "panders to the credentialist notion that rote leaning to get a piece of paper makes you the best candidate." It's the exact opposite, really.

I'm on the autism spectrum, and I like hearing about your approach.

This is a good idea, please make it happen (and allow more locations!)